So, the big question is this, how do aspiring real estate investors like us escape from the rat race and build real wealth and freedom without access to millions of dollars in investment capital and start to live the life that we know we deserve? This is the question and this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Zack Childress and welcome to Real Estate Investing Talk Show.

It’s Week 8. What does that mean? That means we’re a third of the way through our 24-week challenge. One third of the way through we should be starting our marketing and that’s what today’s all about. Last week was about you going after free leads: where are all the free leads, how do you get to them. This week, let’s scale it up a little bit. Let’s take our business to another level. Let’s start paying for leads and if you’re in any type of business and you’re not moving your business into a paid lead source, you’re just getting left behind. It’s just the honest truth. So, you gotta really look at that. You got to look at how can you move your lead sources.

So, but when we talk about marketing for sellers, really what we’re talking about is how do we start paying to acquire leads to benefit our business, right? And you know, you got to unfold a few things. Number one is if I’m going to pay for a lead, where am I going to send that lead to?

Because if you’re going to pay for marketing, the first thing you need to understand is you need to have a very clear understanding of what your skill sets are on that phone. You should not be practicing your skill sets on a paid lead. That’s why last week I showed you all the free lead ways to get out there and start working on your communication skills. We have to take leads into two directions, right?

Ultimately, they all come back to the same place. So, if I’m marketing, I can send leads to a web, a website or call center. Both of those are filtering systems. So, either I have a call-in place or wherever. A web system in place, right? A web system, we also refer to it as a funnel. It’s really to help us ask questions, gather information, and filter them down. Ultimately, they both come to the same place, which is a seller form. So, whether the lead calls your call center, the call center fills out the form issues. They send that form to you.

Whether it’s running an ad for a lead, it’s paying for a lead service, whether it’s sending direct mail, you name it, you pay for lead because remember leads cost what? Money when we’re paying for them. Otherwise, they’re free for outbound. Dialing that lead is either going to call a number that you give it for a call center or it’s going to go to a website that you give to fill out a web form. Either one of these come, they all come right here. They all come to a web form. That web form is then sent to you. It’s keeping it simple for you so that all of those leads flow through a management type flow system and then they come out to a forum so that when you get emailed this form, you’re able to keep up with your lead flow.

You’re able to determine whether that lead is ready to communicate, does it need research, it highly motivated by the questions that are asked in this form. That is what you need to be thinking about when you start paying for leads because some of you have full time jobs, some of you don’t. Either way, you got to have a system that leads are going to flow through. You can’t just say, I’m going to go send out a bunch of direct mail and have them call my cell phone. Guys that don’t work. I’m going to tell you right now because if you’re busy, what happens when you can’t answer all the phone calls, right? What happens? You lose leads. You lose, you’ll lose, you lose, you lose, you lose, and so having a system in place allows you to manage that lead flow, okay? And that’s the crucial part.

It’s called lead management. It’s a highly important process. I’ll give you an example. Every time you pay for a lead, it costs you money. When it’s not called or a form is not filled out, guess what? You lose that money. Look, I get it. I’m on this all the time or in my office all the time. As we get leads in, I expect those leads to be called and communicated with. if they’re not being called, they’re going to somebody else to be called. There has been money spent for that lead, so if you’re going to go out and do this business and you’re going to create a lead system, if you don’t have a call center or a web platform to take that leads information, then you’re out. That’s money you’ve lost.

So, let’s move forward with this. You start your business. You start hiring people to start calling for you. Do you think that you’re going to make sure that they’re on your leads and that they’re dealing with? Absolutely you are right because you’re paying for it, so yeah, it’s the next level. But you need to understand that leads have to be communicated with. If it’s a seller lead, if it’s a buyer lead, if it’s a foreclosure lead, some leads have to be called before other leads. For instance, if a foreclosure lead comes in, I can’t sit around and wait two weeks to call that lead. I got to get on that lead right now. I got to make that lead high priority and I got to make sure it’s communicated to or I lose money. I lose money and here’s the thing. You will never understand that until you become a business owner, you won’t.

It’s just the nature of the beast and so as you start to grow your business and develop your business and build your business out, you’ll start to understand. Look, I know what it’s like calling all day. Now I’m going to hire someone to call for me, so you’re going to monitor their approach. There are aspects of how quickly they get to the leads that you’re giving them big scale thinking, but that’s what all of you should be thinking.

Stop thinking about tomorrow. Start thinking about five years from now, where are you going to go? How do you take your business from a $10,000,000 a year business to a $50 million dollar a year business? How do you take it from $50 million to $100 million? Those are the steps you need to be thinking about. That’s the approach you guys start thinking. How do I grow? Think big, right? Think big. If you’re not thinking big, no one’s going to think big for you. I’ll tell you that right now because here’s why. Why would they think big for you and when you’re not even thinking big, they must think that you don’t know how to think big.

So, resources to find leads on the web. When we’re getting out there and we’re going to start buying data, we need to be able to understand how do we get that data to be able to control the data that’s coming to us. Because what we’re talking about is this – the lead flow. Number one – I’m just going to give something really quick. I’m a fan of RealQuest. I’m a fan of RealtyTrac.com. I think those are some good sites you could get to. I’m also a fan of foreclosures, but here’s something that you want to think about. I want to get leads coming to me as fast as possible.

So, how do I start paying for leads? Well, one of the ways you can pay for a lead is getting bandit signs out there. Be strategic about your bandit signs. Get those things out there, hire someone to put them out for you in the markets that you’ve segmented. That’s important too for you to understand. Another great resource that I use is zBuyer. zBbuyer is a lead service that basically find your leads online for you. You pay them a service, they give you a territory and they basically do SEO and the advertisement through Google for you to get your leads coming in. That’s good resource for you. You want to be using services like a direct mail services like list source, a probate list, inherited list. These are all lists that you can buy. A list source will give you the ability to buy multiple lists, right?

So, we’re going to get into direct mail. Somebody was like, “oh, I don’t want to do direct now.” Well, I’m sorry, but that’s what you got to do. If you want to find motivation, you got to start looking at it from a list point of view. I could do a whole class on direct mail and list and how to get those lists and use those lists in your business. But you need to be marketing to the foreclosure list. You need to be marketing to out of state owners. You need to be marketing to equity rich properties. You need to be marketing to burned out landlords. You need to be marketing to inherited in probates. You need to be doing marketing campaigns to generate this. You need to be paying for bandit signs to go out. You need to be running ads in the newspaper.

You need to be paying for this stuff. You might even want to look at hiring somebody to run ad campaigns, Google ad campaigns for you. The reason behind that is because that’s a targeted marketing approach that you can go after to get leads. But the best part about it is, it’s a lead flow that you can turn up or you can turn down. So, when I’m paying for a lead service direct now or like a CSI buyer or something of that nature, the beauty of that is if it’s working, I can turn it up to get more leads coming in. If it’s not working, then I can slow it down. I can even move that in from a camp like bandit signs. I can take bandit signs and if I’m hitting a certain area and my bandit signs are good, I’m going to use that as an indicator that I need to go rent a billboard sign in that area because, why?

They can’t take it down. I get more exposure, I get more credibility from doing it that way. So, for those you that are in our coaching program, you need to be using the UIS, the Ultimate Investor Software platform which gives you the equity rich properties, free and clear properties, the out of state owners. It gives you all of that inside the coaching software and you should be using it. Another one that you need to look at is a service called the REDX. What’s important about the REDX? That’s where you can get your expired listings. If you want tax, sales and bankruptcies, you need to go to Info USA. So, if you’re to go back and kind of look at this from an approached angle, what I want you to think about is, is number one, what is your marketing budget?

And if you’re saying to me something like, I’m just getting started. I don’t have a whole lot of money. I can’t really invest a lot into this right now. Then that’s great. You need to stay on last week’s call. Last week’s call was all about free leads. It was all about you picking up that phone and dialing that phone. Listen, I can sit here until I’m blue in the face and tell you that the grass is greener on this side of the fence and real estate will make you successful and you are going to fall in love with your life. When you start creating financial freedom, it will do you no good if you don’t take action. If you don’t stop with all the excuses and the multiple strategies, and I’m going to do this, this, this, and this. The reality is you’re going to go nowhere.

You’re absolutely going to go nowhere. You know, Plan A is your only plan because Plan B gives you a reason to quit Plan A. There is so much truth in that. Like you can’t have a plan B, Plan C, Plan D, E, F, G, Y, X, W, whatever it is, right? You got to have Plan A and you got to stick to it until it makes money because I’m here to tell you if your Plan A is to wholesale, you absolutely can make money wholesaling.

If you stick to it, learn the model. Come to our three-day event, learn how to get it done, learn how to break down your market segmentation so that you’re doing it right the first time, you’re making money from it.

That is what I can tell you to do. But if you go into wholesaling and you’re just trying to do it a little bit, and if it doesn’t give you any money over the next couple of three months and you quit, then that’s on you. Then you’re going to jump into tech sales and then you’re going to jump into commercial and you’re going to realize none of it works because you don’t work it correctly. And so, when we moved from free leads to paid leads, there’s a transition there that you have to be aware of, which is the conception that you know what you’re doing, right? That you know what you’re doing and a lot of you don’t know what you’re doing. So, you need to stay with free leads and tell you you know what you’re doing. Or you need to hire a consultant, coach, or a mentor.

Someone like myself or someone in my company that can help you take that transition from free to paid so that we can start to help you scale that business and grow that business into the angle that it needs to go because the only thing that’s stopping you from growing from free lead control to paid lead is the capital needed to do the paid leads. Not just the capital, but the knowledge to know what to do with it and how to set up the right systems that requires knowledge, knowledge to know what to do, knowledge to know when to do it, the knowledge to know that you need help to do it. That’s what it requires. So, I encourage you to think about this last week, freely dialing this week, paid leads, direct mail, online lead services list. How do you get your mail out where you could use a service like click to mail, they’re owned by the US Postal Service?

Those are resources that you need to start thinking about, and are you ready for that? Because there again, let me say it. It will do you a disservice and you will be frustrated at the end if you go out and spend money on leads and you still don’t even know how to talk to them yet, much less how to convert them from the web form into a deal. You’re going to lose and we’re you’re going to lose even more if you don’t have this set up and you’re just paying for leads that are coming in. You can’t keep up with it. I deal with that on an ongoing basis and I get frustrated, right? I get frustrated. I got thousands of leads coming through this office and we can’t keep up with them, right? We don’t. We don’t have enough manpower to keep up with the amount of people that come to this office looking to sell his deals, help, support, you name it. I want to help everybody.

So, you got to think about that, like where are you going to be in your mindset when it comes to your business? Because this is your business. Whether you want to look at it that way or not, it is a business and you have to grow that business. Your responsibility to yourself is to frickin succeed at all costs. That’s your responsibility, nobody else’s. You’ve got to own that on a daily basis. How do you succeed in your life? How do you succeed in your personal growth? How do you succeed at the job you’re working at? Here’s the reality. Some of you are so far from actually becoming an entrepreneur because you still are in your work environment. How you do anything is how you do everything right, so if you’re going to work somewhere before you go into entrepreneurship, you need to work there like it is your company.

You need to work. They’re like you’re the shining star every day and you produce more than anybody and you show up every day ready to win the game of your position that exceeds you to the next level. Naturally, when you come in, complain and whine and grope and moan and complain and whine and groping every moment, looking for every angle that you can get to slack off and not work, then you’re a loser. You’re a loser, you’re a loser at work. You’re a loser in life. You’re a loser because you can’t even commit to yourself enough to be responsible to hold yourself at a higher level than the people around you. How are you ever going to become an entrepreneur and hold yourself at a level that entrepreneurship will require you to be at? You can’t, so you need to get that loser mentality out. Stop complaining and stop whining.

You know, sitting around thinking like, well, what time is it? What time is it? Do I have a break coming? Do I have a break coming? Because that’s a manipulation of yourself telling you to be lazy. That’s what it is, guys. That’s what it is. So, if you want to succeed in life, succeed where you are right now. First be the shining star, out work everybody. Then when it comes to you building your own business, you’re going to outwork everybody there too. People always say to me all the time, they’ll say things to me like that. How’d you get to where you are? I just outworked everybody silently. That’s what I did. I grind in the background constantly. When people aren’t around me, I’m grinding. I’m going home. I’m grinding. Yeah, I’ve got a blessed life, but I grind and grind every day to make sure I’m growing and building in succeeding in life.

I don’t take breaks. What’s a weekend? What’s a weekend? It’s another day. You know what I mean? That’s how I look at it. You got to think differently guys. You kind of put yourself in a position to say, what am I willing to do today that others aren’t so that I can move through my life because I’m here and I will promise you this. If you’re trying to start your own business and you can’t even give a hundred and 10 percent to where you are right now in the position that you are in work life or whatever, then how are you ever going to succeed in business? How are you? You’re not. You might make a paycheck, but you’re not going to grow it. How do you say, well look, I’m going to go out here and start this company. That’s great. You started a company.

It’s making you a paycheck. You’re paying your bills. What do I got to do every day to grind, to grow? Then the problem is when you go out on your own and you start your own business and real estate and you do that first deal, you get happy, but you’re not thinking scale. You’re not thinking market share. You’re not thinking, how do I hire other people to do what I’m doing and how do I go into another market? How do I go from Huntsville to Atlanta to Dallas? How do I expand? How do I think big, right? How do I think big? And it starts where you are right now. That’s what you got to think about. Now, that was a slap of truth right in your face, right there, wasn’t it?

Some of you might’ve took offense to that, but I just called a bunch of people losers, did I? If it’s not you, I didn’t call it to you, right? But if you’re the type of person that’s always looking for an excuse, a reason why it won’t work, you know that, oh, people are being mean to me. Oh, you can’t do that. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Whatever it is, then you’re in that category. Yeah, you are. You absolutely are. 100 percent, you’re in that category. And if you’re the type, it’s always looking for the next town when nobody’s looking. Let me do something else besides my work. Then the problem is, is you’re in that category. You’re in that category, so you need to think about that. Where are you now? Where do you want to go? And if you want to grow your business, you have to pay for leads, you have to. You have to, there’s no other way to do it.

You can dual free leads. Listen, we’ve proven it over and over. You can dial free leads and you can make deals happen. We’ve proven it. Our two-day immersion that we rolled out this year, absolutely. Well, we rolled it out at the end of last year, didn’t we? We proved that. But you have to spend dollars for leads to grow. You follow me. So, you need to figure out what you need to do right now to create that capital, whether it’s wholesale, sandwich, lease options, whatever you need to do to then use that capital to go into your lead source. But you need to be ready for that. So, listen, the show today – yes, I turned it more into smacking you a couple of times – but, I think sometimes we got to get a little wake up call, right?

But ultimately you need to understand paid leads versus free leads. We talked about free leads last week. Go back, watch that video. It’s on the Facebook page. Go over to the right-hand side, click videos, and you’ll find it there. You need to start with free leads and you need to build up your stamina. You need to build up your understanding. Look, some of these sellers aren’t going to be very nice to you, okay? That’s just life. Look, if you feel like every time someone’s mean to you, they offend you. I’m not sorry. I’m just like, grow up, right? It’s the way life works. Don’t be afraid of them. They’re just bad people. Bad people talk to people badly. That’s the way it works. Ultimately, at the end of the day, that’s what it is. If you’re not a nice person, then you’re not going to treat people nice.

You’re going to say things to people that hurts their feelings. You’re going to say things to people that make them feel bad. That’s because you’re not a nice person, so if you’re talking to people that’s doing that, then they’re not nice people. There’s no reason for it even to work with them. Say, Hey, look, sorry you’re not having a good day. Hope you sell your house by now. That’s how I look at it.

You’ve been listening to the Real Estate Investing Talk Show. I’m Zack Childress and I’m on a mission to create 10,000 real estate bosses over the next year. Will you be one of them? Head over to my website, ReiSuccessAcademy.com/labclass and register for my free web class will you’ll discover how to escape from the nine to five grind and become your own boss in real estate. See you there.